


Hollow King

by AvaCelt



Series: Gintama Prompt Fills [15]
Category: Gintama
Genre: M/M, Tumblr Prompt
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-02
Updated: 2016-06-02
Packaged: 2018-07-11 17:14:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 733
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7062058
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AvaCelt/pseuds/AvaCelt
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Katsura makes one final visit to his childhood home and remembers why Yoshida Shouyou will haunt him for the rest of his life.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Hollow King

**Author's Note:**

> Written for "Hurt/Comfort Meme." Originally posted on my [Tumblr writing blog](http://victorsandvanquishers.tumblr.com/) and now being archived here for the A03 writing community.

“You’re Kotarou, aren’t you?” The old lady has a child wrapped with blue cotton fastened to her chest. A piece of the cotton is in the tiny creature’s mouth, its big, brown eyes staring at Katsura with intense curiosity.

“Yes,” Katsura says because he’s not in the city, the Shinsengumi are gone, and the world has fallen.

The old lady gives Katsura a toothless grin. “I remember you. A big boy, even when you were this little,” she chuckles, gesturing at how tall her older grandchild happened to be. “Even after you started going to that temple school, you always came back to your family home. Such a tiny boy, but with such noble diligence. I remember you, Kotarou.”

“And I you,” he tells her with a wistful smile playing on lips. It’s only been a few days since he was declared the first prime minister of Edo, and it would take a few more days until his village fully learned of his position in the new regime.

The old lady nods, gathering her grandchildren close as they begin to walk away. “Always a kind boy, so young, but so noble,” she mumbles as she walks farther and farther away from Katsura. “Like a king in hiding,” he hears her say. “Like a king…”

“Who was that?” Gintoki picks his nose and wipes the booger on Katsura’s sleeve. “Neighborhood granny from the old days?”

“Wife of a farmer,” Katsura corrects him. “She was much younger than my grandmother, but the war and the years seem to have taken a toll on her.”

“If I had two grandkids I was single-handedly raising, I’d start to sag at forty too,” Gintoki shrugs. Then he stills and realizes his mistake. “Don’t you fucking dare,” he flushes, a blush blossoming on his cheeks.

Katsura chuckles, brushing him off. “I don’t have to.”

Gintoki coughs into the crook of his arm before lazily draping an arm around Katsura’s broad shoulders.“You know, by this point you’d have started a monologue about granny’s life history. You’d name all of her her children, all of her grandkids, blah blah bla-”

“Was I always the king?” Katsura interrupts, his eyes still on the receding figures of the old lady and her grandchildren. “When everything was burning, when it burned down, when it was rebuilt, and when it was burned down again- was I always the king?”

“How the hell am I supposed to know?” Gintoki stretches, taking a seat on the rotting, wooden steps of Katsura’s old, family home and beckoning Katsura to join him. “Any notions of superiority were yours and yours alone. Unless Shouyou told you, you were gonna be king, I think you were always just Zura.”

“Just ‘Zura?’”

Gintoki nods, “just Zura.”

“You’re wrong,” Katsura adds, but doesn’t elaborate. Before Gintoki can respond, he’s shuffled away from sight, following a dirt path through the overgrown woods that had swallowed the property after Katsura had left for the war. Gintoki shouts for him to come back, to answer, to tell him why ‘Zura’ never existed. Katsura doesn’t turn around, doesn’t respond, keeps walking through the mess of overgrown grass leaves until he reaches a pond untouched by humanity for twenty-five years.

“You were born to be king,” Shouyou once told him while they prepared sweets for Takasugi’s birthday. “You’ll be king one day, Kotarou-kun, and when you rule, you’ll rule with your soul instead of your body.”

“I’m not King, I’m Katsura,” Katsura had told him.

Shouyou had smiled, patted his head, and let him have some of the sweets before the birthday boy could get his hands on them. “You can be both, but just remember- you’ll always be King, even when Katsura dies.”

“Always?” Katsura had asked with a blank expression.

The evil that was Utsuro had given Katsura a bright smile and kissed his forehead, a father passing his legacy onto his son with a few choice words. “Always.”

“Always,” Katsura whispers into Gintoki’s hair as he embraces him that night, holding tightly the only person that matters. Gintoki wrinkles his nose and continues snoring, his cheek resting against Katsura’s naked chest.

The first prime minister of Edo, former Joui patriot and leader of the rebellion against the Tokugawa regime that had ravaged the land, receives a standing ovation at his inauguration, and Katsura Kotarou’s eyes stay fixed on Gintoki’s grinning face the entire time.


End file.
